Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side... of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

New Yorkers speak more quickly and shift topics more rapidly. We all know that. But the way it's done is fascinating. At least it ...fascinated me when I first moved to New York. Someone has the floor and talks. As soon as I know what they are going to say, I can jump in, finish the sentence to show I understand, and take off into my own turn. The northern California I know isn't like that. Someone talks, and I lie back and listen and let them roll for a while. When they're done, there'll be a pause that will flash like a green light to announce that someone else can have the floor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Your letter is come; it came indeed twelve lines ago, but Icould not stop to acknowledge it before, & I am glad it did not...r />arrive till I had completed my first sentence, because thesentence had been made since yesterday, & I think forms a verygood beginning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Are cans constitutionally iffy? Whenever, that is, we say that we can do something, or could do something, or could have done some...thing, is there an if in the offing--suppressed, it may be, but due nevertheless to appear when we set out our sentence in full or when we give an explanation of its meaning?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifyability. We say that a... sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express--that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as true, or reject it as being false.... To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »